If you are not on Windows 7 yet – it may be time to move. If you are not on a 64bit system yet – it may be time to move. If you have not loaded up your system with RAM – time to slam some more in there. Older OS’s and 32bit will still work, but the demands of the software keep increasing. RAM is always a welcome addition and is an inexpensive upgrade for most.

23 Responses to “AutoCAD 2012 System Requirements”

Remember system requirements are not a one size fits all as there are a number of factors that affect how much resources you require. The factors can be from the complexity of your drawings, 2D or 3D, visual styles such as a 3D part as wireframe takes less than one with a smooth shaded view, and certainly the size of your drawings.

Hmm, we are currently undergoing a review of CAD stations as our 6 year old P4(3.2Ghz), XP, 3.5Gb are struggling with 2011. That being said they have done a good 6 years! Most of the issues relate to the 128Mb ATI V3100’s. We will replace & redistribute the stations to general staff.

It is faster but with a xeon CPU you can run 2 CPUs and get more throughput from multiple threads. I don;t think you can run multiple CPUs with an i7. Seems to me that the xeon lets you build more for the future. One CPU now and add a 2nd when needed.

Both Dell and HP reccomended the Xeon over the i7

And why the 2 HD’s We have everything working off of a file server and only 1 260GB HD on each workstation. No production files are stored on the HDs.

Jeff: fine if you have a file server, otherwise a mirror RAID is essential – I have just had a HD fail but could carry on with the remaining disk without losing anything.
I though AutoCAD was only multithreaded for regens (?) and then only across two processors, not cores, so the only advantage in a multicore processor was that Windows separated other programs to the other cores, so that AutoCAD did not have to share the processing time on a single core. This would seem to indicate that raw processor speed was more important.
But (there’s always a but) throughput of data to and from the processor must be significant when dealing with large files or multiple xrefs/underlays so then we get into cache sizes, memory speed and number of memory channels. Looking at the specs of the array of Xeons and trying to work out which is best (all else being equal) is a nightmare.
Or would any differences in processors be overridden by RAM and graphics card?

Hello there, I am an architectural engineering student,
I have HP Pavilion dv6 with processor Intel core i7-2670qm CPU 2.2 GHz, 6 gb of RAM, x64 bit.
mobile Intel HD Graphics, total memory 780 mb
and my cad 2012 lags very badly, even though i do not draft in 3d…
I can’t even draw a line properly…
could any1 suggest what do I do?
could I improve my graphics? or what cad version should I run?
I DESPERATION NEED HELP… my final is in few days…

Everything you have listed should be enough to get the job done. Clean up your machine and remove all malware and viruses using standard free tools. Reboot and try again. Stop all other programs and just use CAD.

I’m thinking on buying a Samsung Series 9 (SAMSUNG NP900X4C) and I would like to know if AutoCAD 12 can run good on it. As an architecture student, this is my main concern on buying a new laptop. With my current one I get ‘out of system memory’ with some frequency – especially when trimming or hatching – and it is a 32bits Vista Home Premium, Dual Core 2GHz 4GBRAM.